The top reported proficiency rate is 36% in English language arts. The lowest is 14% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Madelia Elementary
Madelia Elementary serves students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade in a single building within the Madelia Public School District. The school sits in a small prairie town that relocated its downtown core from the Watonwan River floodplain generations ago, leaving behind a compact historic district with two properties on the National Register. A substantial share of town residents identify as Hispanic, and that composition carries directly into the school, where Hispanic students make up about half of the enrollment. White students account for most of the rest, and the school draws almost exclusively from those two groups; representation from other racial and ethnic backgrounds is very small.
Enrollment is modest for a school serving this wide a pre-K-through-sixth-grade span, and about half of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The town itself has been stable in population size, and recent community attention has focused on recovering a downtown commercial district after a fire destroyed several businesses. Voters also approved a bond referendum that funded an addition to the elementary school and some renovation work, a sign of local investment in the building.
Academically, the school’s state testing results show a pattern that varies considerably across grade levels and subjects. In the most recent testing year, reading proficiency reached roughly half of the tested students at the sixth-grade level, but dipped notably lower at the fourth-grade level. Math results followed a similar uneven arc, with the strongest performance at sixth grade and a sharp drop at fifth grade. The fifth-grade science results were much lower than the reading and math numbers at that same grade, though the state changed both the test name and cut scores for science that year, which makes a direct comparison less straightforward. Taken together, the school’s overall proficiency index falls above the midpoint when measured against the other districts in Watonwan County, a three-district set where the range is narrow. The school sits in the upper part of that small pack, but the gap between the top and bottom is tight.
A parent looking at these grade-level swings will want to understand why a cohort that posts strong results in one grade can show much weaker results in the grade above or below. The district recently adopted new integrated curriculum frameworks for math and reading, replacing previous materials and aligning to updated state standards. That change took effect in the 2023-2024 school year, so the testing data available here reflects instruction under those new frameworks. Whether that shift will narrow the unevenness across grades is something a family may want to discuss with the school directly, since only one year of data under the new curriculum is available so far.
Because Madelia Elementary serves only elementary and middle grades, there is no graduation rate to report, and the school does not offer the kind of advanced coursework or career pathways that families evaluating a high school would look for. The student-teacher ratio and class-size information were not available in the data reviewed here, so parents who consider class size a priority should inquire with the school directly. Chronic absenteeism data was also not available.
For a family weighing this school, the town offers a modest, quiet setting with a historic downtown, a riverside park complex, and a small Catholic parochial school as an alternative through sixth grade. The elementary school campus sits apart from that downtown core, and the sense of scale is intimate throughout. The academic picture is mixed, and the most useful next step for a parent would be to ask the school how reading and math instruction differ across grade levels and what supports are in place for students who arrive at fourth or fifth grade with gaps.
See more original research from School Decision →